Structure of Moral Principles

Alas, I have been called a MORAL RELATIVIST! By another anarchist too! Here is our debate (comments on his blog post). And what did this come out of? Well, I simply stated that individual moral values cannot be considered more than mere opinions of the individuals themselves. This is because they are nonenforceable. If I cannot go and correct something in my neighbour's behaviour then he officially has the right to do it, and something you have the right to do cannot be immoral. The logic is simple. If this was not the case, rights wouldn't make any sense. How could someone have a right to do something immoral? That contradicts the very definition of rights. After all there is "right" and there is "wrong". Right being moral is a tautology.

"So how can we oppose things like unfairness, or exploitation on moral grounds?" asks the leftist. Firstly, I judge unfairness or exploitation through the prism of the non-aggression axiom. If someone has agreed to be treated in a certain way, then the action cannot be aggression. And if someone breaks my property rights and I punish them, that is not aggression either. Leftists would disagree, but that is because they do not respect the non-aggression axiom enough. They hold other beliefs which are contradictory to it.

What about the case of animal cruelty? Clearly I have written multiple times that it is evil, but does not break the non-aggression axiom. The answer is simple: In my viewpoint animal cruelty is evil. This is just a personal opinion I hold. And this, though it might seem weak, is actually not weak at all. What we call my mere opinion is LAW on my private property just like non-aggression is the LAW in the world at large. Yes, my house is my Kingdom (Monarchism!). My word is Law on my property. In a leftist world this would be impossible because we do not really "own" land or space as property. No one can present a good enough explanation why not, of course, but they still claim so (even Herbert Spencer was on their side here!). I usually see this anti-land-ownership fetish as an old vestige of religious dogma as introduced into modern ethics by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith.

Anarcho-capitalists are voluntaryists in the sense that we believe voluntary exchanges to be always mutually beneficial ex ante. If this makes me a moral relativist, then people like leftist anarchists are MORAL ILLUSIONISTS. Their morality cannot work. We cannot have an ideal utopia of mutually beneficial relations ex post facto because we do not know what effect our actions will have on both parties. Let me illustrate this with an example. If I give someone a million dollars, then in the voluntaryist morality I am perfectly entitled to do so and I am moral. So is the receiver of the money, he did nothing wrong. But now let's assume the next day he buys a Ferrari and accidentally runs it off of a huge cliff while his wife is in the car. Nobody can accuse me of wrongdoing, despite the fact that ex post facto my action of giving the man the money is what actually caused the car-accident. The accident would never have taken place if not for me! But I think we can all see how silly such thinking is. We cannot interrelate all actions in the world this way or else everyone would be guilty of everything. But to some people this is not so absurd. We can actually see leftists argue this way in socialist states where prisons are built for resocilization programs rather than punishments. After all, the individuals in the prisons are just a product of their society, the lefties say. The rapist and the thief were helpless! The society is guilty! We just put them in a comfy hotel for 5 years and let them out if they cry in front of a psychologist...